Chapter 3 - Citizenship

Summary

Chapter 3 examines the 1998 Tinderbox production of Stewart Parker’s Northern Star in the First Presbyterian Church in Belfast in relation to the “peace dividend” that has been widely promoted since the early days of the peace process in Northern Ireland but has at best been fitfully realised. This chapter takes seriously the proposition that, under certain circumstances, a single theatrical production might achieve a greater political and economic return than either the state or the market can. When Henry Joy McCracken stepped forward and addressed the audience in the First Presbyterian Church as “citizens of Belfast” in 1998, he realised a peace dividend in a very material and immediate form, to an extent that the state and the market have never convincingly been able to do in Northern Ireland. The production provided a living model of what a non-marketised peace dividend – a “citizen of Belfast” – might look and feel like, and posited theatre as the ideal (and possibly only) place to find it.